Exercises for Short-Term Memory Training

How to keep exercising your short-term memory to prevent it from worsening when aging

It is always possible to improve your short-term memory by using several simple exercises. Try one of the following or, better, create a few of your own that will make you use your own imagination and remember a vast amount of details for a few seconds, minutes or hours. Memory exercises should be fun.

Memory Exercise 1

Underline all three consecutive digits that add up to 17:
2647585973524163647687980658467352425475768798067
8967564354324363729201038475675769867960540913836
7218394105098548212121436510102743557281018364528

Memory Exercise 2

Look at the following list for five seconds and then see how many words you can remember after covering it up:

pen

mobile phone

tree washing

books

flapping

gun

aunt

fall

It is highly a possibility that you could not remember more than five or six words. If you want to remember more, make up a short story. For example, I had my pen and my mobile phone in my hand, and I was under a tree with my aunt’s washing flapping in the wind. I read in my books that a man with a gun had a fall.

No doubt this will take much longer than five seconds, but the idea is that, with regular training, you will become able to make up stories in your mind without even thinking much about it. The story doesn’t have to make logical sense but it will jog your memory in the short term.

When you finish this exercise, ask somebody to give you another list of unrelated words and try to make these into another story. Have fun with it.

Memory Exercise 3

A similar way of remembering things is by learning lists of words. For example, try to remember these: cat, shirt, dog, biscuits, trousers, lemon, tie, giraffe, bread, peppers, snake, coat.

At first, this looks very difficult. But if you separate these words into three groups such as `animals’, `food’ and `clothing’, you will be able to organize your thoughts. This uses the technique of chunking in order to help learning.

Your list will look like this:

cat, dog, giraffe, snake

shirt, trousers, tie, coat

biscuits, lemon, bread, peppers

Spend some time trying to remember these. If you wish you can use mental pictures – for example a dog running after a cat and a giraffe with a snake on its neck.

These are just a few exercises which will stimulate you to start regular long-term memory training. They will help refresh your memory and learning abilities, and after some training you will be able to use the tricks subconsciously. It takes some time to get used to them and to decide which trick to use and for what occasion, but they usually work well.

You have to keep exercising your memory well into very old age to prevent it from worsening. Look out for other exercises in memory books or come up with some of your own.